An ongoing edible adventure

Recipes - Meat - Pork

17 July 2011

And now for the long overdue 3rd and final chapter to this little porcine trilogy -- an afternoon in the kitchen. A potluck of ideas and recipes on what to do with pork, the results of which were to be shared with everyone at dinner. Here are some of the delicious results.

I ended up with pork chops to play with. Butcher Jim's recommendation was to deep fry them. How could I possibly disagree with the man? I improvised, and didn't think much of it. But Dingley Dell boss Mark Hayward went around the tables at dinner asking who made them because he was rather taken with them! *Beam*

So I thought I'd share with you what I did. Pardon the complete lack of proportions!

Pour the beer into a large bowl. Sift the flour and salt into the beer. Whisk until the batter is light and frothy. Set aside.

Right. Get a big pan and drizzle in some sunflower or vegetable or rapseseed oil. Let the oil get hot, then put in as many chops as the pan will fit. Do this in batches if needed. Fry for about 7 minutes each side. A little less if your chops are thinner, a little more if they are thicker. Check by sticking a sharp knife into the chop. The meat should be white and opaque rather than pink and seeping pink juice.

When all the chops are done being pan fried, pour in about an inch of oil and let it heap up till it starts to smoke.

Dredge the chops 1 by 1 in the batter quickly, then place in the pan until the batter is golden brown, probably about 30 seconds for each side. Don't do many chops at a time at this stage. You don't want the temperature of the oil to drop significantly.

That's it! Serve up, chow down.

A final thanks to the Edwards brothers, butchers Jim and Wayne, Rachel and Donald for organising and fellow participants for making it such a fun and memorable day!

03 June 2011

Above: Straight from the source -- Hakka pork belly mui choi paired with rice congee. Delectable comfort food as sampled in my ancestral village in Dabu, Guangdong, China, said to be the Hakka capital of the world.

Pork Belly Mui Choi. The very whisper of this traditional Hakka dish for me ignites waves of homesickness and nostalgia and pleasure.

The slow-cooked melty pork belly slices and the sweet-salty pickled mustard greens were a staple indulgence (if that makes sense) during my growing up years in Singapore. I've always loved this dish dearly, eating a single batch for multiple meals over multiple days if I'm home visiting.

And then I tried the dish in Dabu, Guangdong, (aka the Hakka capital of the world) during a pilgrimage to my ancestral village in China, one of the many chapters of our 15-month backpacking honeymoon. And although it didn't taste all that different from my family's version at home, an unexplained blasphemous thought did cross my mind at that dinner: "If there is no pork belly mui choi in heaven, I might have to rethink my strategy for the afterlife..."

As much as I love this dish, I was a bit (pleasantly) taken aback by the reaction it got. If I could beam anymore, my cheeks would fall off my face. Maybe they never stood any chance, really. The fat, sugar and salt in this dish is very much a triple-strength heat-seeking missile for pleasure sensors in the human body. Resistance is futile.

(Then disaster strikes. My little netbook, which held out through Lao jungles and Jordan deserts and Bolivian highlands, finally decided to give up and roll over. Along with my pork belly moi choi step by step instruction photos, along with 20,000 other photos from being on the road.

That was a bit drama queeny. The photos are backed up. Somewhere. It'll just take me a few days to get back to them. But I just wanted to make sure that this recipe got out in time for the weekend. I do like to deliver on my chat.

So, I'll add photos next week. In the meantime...) -- Problem mitigated, thanks to the ever brilliant Babs. Now with photos included!

Note on the pork belly: Try to get a medium-fatty piece. Too fatty and the whole thing just melts and flakes away into nothing too quickly. You do want solid pieces for presentation. Too lean and you'll need to cook it for more hours to get it to the right level of tenderness in the meat

Note on the mui choi: I've had friends ask me where I got mine, cos theirs "didn't taste right". I got these below from Loong Fung in London's Chinatown (the one photo I COULD access!), and they definitely tasted right, for me at least! It takes a bit of hunting, especially the sweet variety. Look in their pickled and dried vegetables and herbs section.

Directions:

Prepping the mui choi

Soak the mui choi in a big basin of water. Leave standing for about 15 minutes. Drain the water and refill with fresh water. Repeat this process 2 more times. It's better to oversoak the mui choi and resalt it later, rather than have it be painfully kidney-cringe-salty in the pot.

Rinse the mui choi thoroughly under running water, to get rid of sand and grit

Dice the mui choi into ~1cm by 1cm sections

Chop up the garlic roughly

Prepping the pork belly:

Slice the pork belly into strips, then little slabs. Assuming you'e not some pre-schooler kitchen prodigy, the eventual pieces should be about the size and thickness of your 3 middle fingers held together. Sometimes your pork belly will come with a few ribs. Trim out the hard bones and use for soup or BBQ some other time. You can leave the cartilegy little bones in if you want. Sometimes your pork belly will come with a few sow nipples. You can decide if you want to keep them on or trim them off (Goz suggests making nipple chicharron... the perv...)

Putting it all together:

Heat up a wok or a large chef's pan on the stove, at medium heat

Sear the pork belly pieces on all sides for about 5 minutes, lightly browning the pork and rendering some of the fat. Do this in batches if necessary

Remove the pork belly and set aside

Add the cooking oil to the pan. Add 1-2 more tablespoons of oil if the pork belly is particularly lean

Add the garlic to the pan, and fry for a couple of minutes, softening the garlic

Add the chopped up moi choi and stir fry for ~15 minutes, making sure that everything is evenly coated with oil

Transfer the mui choi and garlic into a large pot

Place the pork belly on top of the bed of mui choi

Sprinkle on the sugar and drizzle on the dark soya sauce

Pour in boiling water until all of the pork is covered

Slow cook on low heat for at least 3 hours. For the inaugural Plusixfive dinner the pork belly was a lean cut and they were proper outdoor reared pigs, so to get the texture I was happy with, I slowcooked everything for 6 hours, then slowcooked just the pork for an additional 2 hours. You want the pork to be super tender, holding together just long enough to make it to your mouth before it melts and falls apart. Fattier cuts will need less cooking time

Taste. Add salt or some more dark soya sauce as necessary. The dish should be very savoury, but you should be able to taste the tinge of sweetness. The pork should also be a medium-dark brown from the dark soya sauce (some brands which I don't like leave a much wimpier colouring)

Dish out into a bowl. It's prettier if the mui choy is below, and the pork is arranged on top. (I've taken to fishing out the pork carefully first in to a separate bowl, then scooping out the mui choi. This helps to keep the very soft pork belly pieces intact until you bring it to the table.)

Serve with rice, or watery Teochew-style plain rice congee

This dish actually tastes better after sitting and reheating. If you make a big batch and somehow manage not to eat it all in one meal, freeze a bowl's worth in each freezer bag, and simply warm up in a pot before serving.

08 August 2010

When making Ang Chow (Foo Chow red rice wine), it's clear enough what you do with the chunks of grainy red reside -- make Ang Chow Mee Sua -- as well as the wine (simply drink it, Dad decided). But what do you do with the fine silty red reside left over from filtering the wine?

It's a great marinade for deep frying, as I found out while learning how to make Ang Chow from Mum. The fermented rice reside gives a sweet tinge to the otherwise savoury meat, not to mention a fantastic fragrance and naturally-derived festive colour.

Here's Mum's recipe for Ang Chow fried chicken, which she tried one evening on a lark earlier this year. It worked a treat!

Ingredients

Serves 6-12

6 chicken drumsticks and 6 chicken thighs

Note: We kept the bones in when cooking this dish. The meat close to the bone was a little pinker than Mum would have liked. But increasing the frying time is likely to char the marinade coating. A few ideas for solving this this dilemma, for next time:

Use deboned chicken legs and thighs

Make slashes in the thickest parts of the chicken legs and thighs if keeping the bones in

When making her Kerala-style fried chicken, Bab's Aunty Sara steams the chicken for 5 minutes before frying. This helps to partly-cook the chicken, not to mention seal in the juices before frying

When ready for frying, coat each chicken piece lightly with flour 1 at a time

Heat up the frying oil (about 2-3 fingers deep) in a cooking pot on high stove heat until the oil starts to bubble

Deep fry the chicken for about 5 minutes

Remove the chicken pieces from the oil, and set on paper towels for a few minutes to drain the excess oil

Bonus Tips!

This recipe was originally used by Grandma to deep fry chunks of shark meat (below) -- very cheap fish when my Mum was growing up. As much as I love the taste and texture of shark, these days I avoid eating shark as it is severely overfished. This is largely due to the the shark-fin trade. Because fins command exponentially higher prices than shark meat, fishermen lop off shark fins and leave the maimed shark in the water to die. Heinous. And worse than that in my books, bloody wasteful.

So, if you'd like to try a fish rendition of this recipe, use a more sustainable chunky white fish such as halibut (called colin in some markets).

Our longtime housekeeper Aunty Kiew Moi has also been known to use this recipe to deep-fry slices of pork belly. Diabolical.

The recipe and method is the same, though deep frying time for the pork belly might be less depending on how thinly the pork belly is sliced.

02 August 2010

You'll protest. You'll campaign for some version by some relative or restaurant. Maybe it'll involve ingredients like crab, or salted egg, or salted-fish slivers. I'll nod and smile. I'll invite you to organise a taste-off. I might even really enjoy your candidate. But just so we're clear, I'm not actually going to concede anything.

Ok, I might concede that I'm a tad biased. But I'll have you know, this fried rice has been known to inspire saint-like patience among its pilgrims.

For about a decade now my Mum's been involved in a bible study organisation. They meet every week, and every year they mix up all the members in all the groups to make sure everyone circulates. Once a year, each small group gathers at their discussion leader's home for a social lunch.

Fried rice is at the top of my Mum's list of reliable party tricks, so she serves it at just about every one of these bible study group social lunches. Except she's been with the organisation so long that this year she had a few women in her group who were also in her group 7 years ago.

She took them aside at lunch to apologise for serving fried rice again.

So. Even if you don't believe this is the world's best fried rice, you have to admit it's at least a bit... divine, no?

Mum's had a lot of time to perfect this recipe. She's been making it probably since the 1960s, to serve up when her entire family went to Changi Beach for their annual family picnic. Since then both the fried rice and Changi Beach have gotten more colourful, and developed more character (or characters, in the case of some notorious parking lots at Changi Beach). But the foundation stone to this dish remains the same: The rice has to be steamed and totally cooled before the frying process, so that it will stay whole and grainy when fried, rather than break down into a damp starchy goop.

Still not convinced? Ah well. As a certain Good Book said somewhere, maybe you'll just have to "taste and see that it is good".

Note: Photos here show Mum's fried rice being cooked for 16. I've halved the proportions in the text of this post so that it should serve 8. Just in case this all looks like an optical illusion!

Ingredients

6 cups white rice, cooked and cooled down the day before frying

Olive oil
5 eggs, cracked into a bowl and beaten quickly with a fork for 2 minutes until air bubbles form
3 Lap cheong (waxed Chinese sausages), finely diced. Look for these in an Asian specialist grocery. For the really adventurous, Rose's Kitchen even has a recipe to make your own!
500g small prawns, peeled and de-veined (Always save the heads and shells. Freeze them until you need to make a prawn-based soupstock e.g., tomyum soup!)
250g char siew (BBQed roast pork), finely diced. Any decent Cantonese-style Chinese diner selling roast meats will also sell this. Again, for the really adventurous, here are some char siew recipes from My Wok Life, Chubby Hubby and Rasa Malaysia if you want to try making your own
A handful of shallots, finely chopped
Salt and light soya sauce to taste

Serve up with shredded lettuce and sliced cucumber and tomato on the side

Garnish rice with spring onion and cilantro

Drizzle on a little cut red chili and lime juice

Bonus tip if you've read this far: If you're really serious about your audience for this dish, get this all fried up the day before you're serving it. Let the flavours sit and meld for a day, and reheat the fried rice either by steaming or microwaving (steaming preferred, to keep the prawns tender) just befor serving. It tastes even more heavenly then!

31 March 2010

Suan pan zhi, or yam abacus seeds, was always a bit of a mystery to me growing up. I'd only ever see it and eat it in 1 place -- at Ah Pak (my Dad's paternal cousin and the current patriarch of the Soh clan) and his wife Pak Meh's house. And only ever on the first day of Chinese New Year. Some years we'd get a tasting bowl of it while visiting, some years it wouldn't even be there (I think those years we got to Ah Pak's too late).

All I knew was that suan pan zhi was a very old school Hakka delicacy, and it was bloody tasty with a lot of bite. So as part of my project to chase down my culinary inheritance, I entreated Pak Meh through my parents to teach me how to make this dish while I was in Singapore for Chinese New Year this year.

And not a moment too soon! Turns out Pak Meh had decided to "retire" from this dish from this year onwards. She's decided that her kids can make it next year or not eat it at all. Yikes!

And no wonder. Making the beads is hard work, requiring you to really put your back and arms into it. Throughout the session Pak Meh was critiqueing my technique -- I'll need to practise!

Researching suan pan zhi on my own later, I learned that the Hakkas eat this dish on festive occasions. The Hakkas (which liternally means guest people) were named such because they were a migratory group. Their cuisine tends to be made from very hearty ingredients that will keep (think salt and oil). Hence the use of the hardy yam here. Also, Hakkas have a stereotype of being good with money, so the yam gnocci taking on the image of the seeds of the abacus counting board allude to that.

More delightfully, an article on So Shiok!revealed that suan pan zhi is specifically from the Hakkas in Dabu in China's Guangdong province. This is where my paternal grandfather and great grandfather are from, and Dad and Ah Pak had already agreed to take me on my first pilgrimmage to Dabu this coming May. I can't wait to dig further into this story... and more of this dish!

The ratio of yam to tapioca flour is highly variable. Pak Meh once used a yam : flour ratio of 4:1, which she said produced an amazingly intense fragrance and flavour, but a very short shelf life, even when kept in the freezer afterwards. Commercial ventures tend to use a 1:1 ratio, which helps the beads keep longer but produce a much starchier, chewier and less fragrant bead. Here we start with a ratio of about 2.5:1. Experiment to see what gets you your favourite balance of flavour and bite.

A few stalks of coriander cut into finger-length sections
1 large red chili, sliced on the diagonal and deseeded

Making the Yam Abacus Seeds

Sprinkle some salt over yam and steam for 15 minutes until soft and cooked (Check to see if a chopstick will poke through the yam)

Put yam in a large pot, add the tapioca flour, and mash and mix while still hot to form a dough. This is quite a bit of work! You can start off with a potato masher, but eventually you'll need to put the back of your palms into it and really lay it in, pocketing bits of air into the dough as you go

Make small balls, and use your finger to make a slight depression in the centre of each ball to make it look like an abacus seed. Try to make the "beads" evenly sized so that they can be evenly cooked

Boiling the Yam Abacus Seeds

Boil a large pot of water and add the yam seeds one small batch at a time, stirring well to prevent them from sticking together. Boil for about 15 minutes, until the batch floats on the boiling water

Remove the seeds from the boiling water with a strainer and coat with 2 to 3 tablespoons of oil to prevent sticking. Set aside in a sieve over a an empty pot to let excess water drip away (right)

Frying the Yam Abacus Beads

Heat about 6 tablespoons of vegetable oil in wok on high heat

Add the chopped garlic and stir-fry until fragrant

Add the tawkua, pounded haybee and mushrooms and stir-fry for 2 to 3 minutes until fragrant

Add the chopped spring onions and coriander and stir through for another minute

Taste, and add salt, pepper and fish sauce and stir through if necessary

Serve up in a casserole dish and garnish with the chili slices and coriander stalks

Serve as a standalone dish or as part of a meal with rice

Parting Shot: Abacus Seeds Spreading and Taking Root

For those who would like to try this dish but are not yet ready to commit to making it at home, I found these leads online that suggest that you can try it at Mei Zhen in Singapore and Nam Chuan in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (I haven't eaten at these establishments myself). If you've tried suan pan zhi elsewhere, I'd love to hear from you!